It's hard to imagine how Motorola and Verizon could have been more misleading.

When it came to technical specifications, Verizon's reveal of its new Motorola Droid lineup this morning was very creative, and not in a good way. The prime offender was the system-on-a-chip (SoC) at the heart of these phones, a chip dubbed the Motorola X8.

Let's start by calling out all the companies involved for their core-inflating duplicity: Motorola arrives at its "eight core" figure by taking the CPU cores, GPU cores, and a couple of coprocessors (one for "contextual computing" and one for voice processing) and lumping them all together. At best, this is misleading.

The first problem is that core count by itself is no better an indicator of actual performance than clock speed by itself—you need to know about the exact architectures involved, as well as figures like memory bandwidth, before you can even begin to make generalized assumptions about performance. Most regular people don't really make these distinctions, though—counting every single thing in the X8 SoC as a "core" to inflate that core count is a marketing tactic to make the phones seem more impressive than they are.

The second problem, of course, is that these different "cores" each perform dramatically different tasks. If the phone instead had four CPU cores and only two GPU cores, it would have the same total number of "cores" by Motorola's logic, but the real-world performance of the phone would be dramatically different. Some Googlers pulled a similar trick when the company launched the Nexus 7 last year, lumping the Tegra 3's four CPU cores and 12 individual GPU shaders together and saying that the tablet had "16 cores." If you know more about the details, you'll know that the new Droid Ultra is much faster than the Nexus 7, but these unhelpful inflated core counts make it sound like the reverse should be true.

Finally, let's talk about the underlying architecture. Motorola has said that the X8 is a custom chip, and there's no reason to doubt that that's true. What the X8 isn't, however, is a chip based on Motorola's own architecture or even its own design. Ars associate writer Casey Johnston got me a quick snap of a screen from the Android System Info app, and it lists the SoC's part number as MSM8960DT.

Those of you who follow this sort of thing will recognize that as a Qualcomm part number, specifically a slight variation on one of its existing Snapdragon S4 Pros (part number MSM8960T). That chip uses two Krait 200 1.7GHz CPU cores and an Adreno 320 GPU, and these specs line up exactly with the numbers that Verizon did announce, as well as their promised performance increases over the previous-generation Droid phones (24 percent faster CPU performance and twice the GPU performance of the outgoing Snapdragon S4 Plus in the Droid Razr HD). There's some speculation as to what the extra "D" in the part number indicates—some have suggested that it will exchange the Krait 200 CPU architecture for the slightly faster Krait 300, which seems logical given that otherwise a jump from 1.5GHz to 1.7GHz shouldn't give you 24 percent better performance.

At any rate, the Motorola X8 is more or less a Qualcomm Snapdragon.

That's not a bad thing—the Snapdragon lineup powers virtually every non-Apple, mid- to high-end smartphone in the US, and they've proven to be very capable performers. It just serves to further highlight the lack of useful technical information that Motorola and Verizon are giving out—not only is the "eight core" count a pointless and deceptive number, but the new processor that's powering the phones is in reality a gently tweaked version of a year-old SoC. To add insult to injury, all of this marketing-speak seems designed to cover up the fact that Motorola's SoC is still a fair bit slower than the Snapdragon 600s (and, soon, 800s) that are powering comparably priced high-end phones from the likes of Samsung, HTC, and LG.

This won't be the last we see of the MSM8960DT—it's widely rumored to be the chip powering the upcoming Moto X, which we'll be learning more about on August 1, if not before. Just know that if Motorola and Google pull the same marketing tricks at the Moto X reveal that Verizon helped them pull today, this is the chip that you're actually looking at.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

I'm working a 36-core SoC design. 16 of the cores are 6510's, 10 ten are Z80's, two are Hercules Graphics Adapters, two are FM synthesizers I pulled off of old SoundBlaster Pro or Adlib cards (whatever I could find at Goodwill), three are 8088s, and the remaining three are actually people doing jobs it offloads to Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Reminds of way back when the TurboGrafx 16 game console was revealed to be an 8-bit machine but the NEC marketing department said it performed like 16-bit processor and used a 16-bit graphics chipset so that made it OK. The market sorted that out soon enough, though.

I have to wonder what the logic behind this masterpiece of marketing is. The non-techies won't even notice any specs aside from the screen, battery life, and how often they run out of space or suffer agonizing slowdowns, so lying to them about cores is pretty pointless.

Once you get into the realm of even-vaguely-technical, lying is pointless, at best, because the lie is trivially transparent.

Who, exactly, is the audience here? The second somebody benchmarks any early release model, it'll be reasonably clear where this thing stands relative to the pack, and it will come down to whether they managed to not cruft it up or not.

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Interestingly enough, big.Little is actually designed so that the OS can elect to have all eight cores running but there's something unimplemented in the Exynos 5 making it impossible.

I wanted a leading edge SoC from THIS YEAR. I got one from last year with a core dedicated to a feature I don't want and won't use.I wanted an SD Card and HDMI. I got Miracast that requires an adapter bigger than the phone...

Maybe RAZR-HD Maxx's will be cheaper on the used marked. That's the best feature of the Ultra series!

I have to wonder what the logic behind this masterpiece of marketing is. The non-techies won't even notice any specs aside from the screen, battery life, and how often they run out of space or suffer agonizing slowdowns, so lying to them about cores is pretty pointless.

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

edit: making clear that I'm asking for Samsung to get the same treatment, not for MotoGoogle to get a pass for this kind of behavior.

The Octa actually has 8 CPU cores. It doesn't count GPU cores or crap like that. While it's only designed to have 4 running at any given time (in that implementation), it really is an 8 core phone (and an interesting solution to power vs. battery life consumption, at that). There was no lie there.

The Motorola phone in this story isn't 8-core except by an incredibly wild stretch that absolutely no-one in the tech field would accept as valid. It's a lie by the conventional definition of a "core" (like saying I'm 12 meters tall... which is true, if I redefine the meter).

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

edit: making clear that I'm asking for Samsung to get the same treatment, not for MotoGoogle to get a pass for this kind of behavior.

I don't think the situations are the same. The Octa actually DOES have eight cores, and unlike some other outlets that covered the Octa I'm pretty clear about how only four of them can be used at any one time. "The upshot of this is that the Exynos 5 Octa's maximum performance will be consistent with a quad-core Cortex-A15 chip like Nvidia's Tegra 4."

Also, if you might remember, I got similarly pissed at Intel at CES when they invented a non-TDP figure and then tried to say they were selling 7W chips. I think I'm pretty consistent when people are obfuscating through marketing. :-)

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

" To add insult to injury, all of this marketing-speak seems designed to cover up the fact that Motorola's SoC is still a fair bit slower than the Snapdragon 600's (and, soon, 800's) "

Krait what? 200 or 300?

Isn't there a rumor that MSM8960DT is basically a dual core Snapdragon 600? Both have Adreno 320 GPU.

Let me tweak that. Long story short I'm not sure, but if it's Krait 300 that might help explain why that "24 percent" figure is higher than the 200MHz speed bump could explain by itself.

Krait is the CPU architecture, Snapdragon the SoC line's name. The Snapdragon 600s use the Krait 300 architecture and the Snapdragon 800s use the Krait 400 architecture. Don't know what uses Krait 200, but it probably is the S4 line.

Reminds of way back when the TurboGrafx 16 game console was revealed to be an 8-bit machine but the NEC marketing department said it performed like 16-bit processor and used a 16-bit graphics chipset so that made it OK. The market sorted that out soon enough, though.

The old Neo•Geo was touted as 24-bit. 16bit plus an 8bit. Think the Jaguar did similar silliness to get to 64bits of marketing power. Its entertaining to see the current metric abused for marketing purposes...

I remember during old MHz wars it was worth asking how powerful the chip was... One site clicked a bunch of CPU's to 1ghz and benchmarked them. Think it was Athlon > Pentium 3 > Pentium 4...

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

edit: making clear that I'm asking for Samsung to get the same treatment, not for MotoGoogle to get a pass for this kind of behavior.

I don't think the situations are the same. The Octa actually DOES have eight cores, and unlike some other outlets that covered the Octa I'm pretty clear about how only four of them can be used at any one time. "The upshot of this is that the Exynos 5 Octa's maximum performance will be consistent with a quad-core Cortex-A15 chip like Nvidia's Tegra 4."

Also, if you might remember, I got similarly pissed at Intel at CES when they invented a non-TDP figure and then tried to say they were selling 7W chips. I think I'm pretty consistent when people are obfuscating through marketing. :-)

Seems counter-productive to me for companies to do this kind of thing. Those who care about specs are gonna see right through this, and the iDiots who only care about what color it comes in aren't going to give a rat's ass one way or the other.

What happens if you actually use all 8 cores? Does the battery instantly explode or does it merely catch on fire?

You can't use all 8 in Samsung's implementation, in part because its badly broken. The rev 2 version is coming out shortly, and in theory it could although they haven't said if it'll be enabled (my guess is no as software support for full 8 way big.little is still a little new in linux).

Saying it's just an S4 pro is just as misleading, since it doesn't have a four core GPU or the same "helper cores" Marketing is always shady, don't let it ruin what sounds like a legitimate alternative to the throw more CPU cores at it approach.

Hmm, normally I don't question Ars' objectivity, but I've got to call Ars on this one. Where was your outrage when Samsung pulled a FAR worse marketing lie with the Exynos 5 "Octa" that is really only 4 cores?? The same author covered that issue just a few months ago in March, with nary a word of criticism of Samsung for that massive lie. The fact is mentioned, but with no censure whatsoever. And here we have a torrent of criticism for a LESS egregious marketing lie. Why is that?

At least all the overcounted cores in this marketing debacle can run at the same time- Samsung committed a bigger lie, since only one of every big.LITTLE core pair on the Octa can even run simultaneously.

Come on, acknowledge that what Samsung did was just as bad, if not worse.

edit: making clear that I'm asking for Samsung to get the same treatment, not for MotoGoogle to get a pass for this kind of behavior.

I don't think the situations are the same. The Octa actually DOES have eight cores, and unlike some other outlets that covered the Octa I'm pretty clear about how only four of them can be used at any one time. "The upshot of this is that the Exynos 5 Octa's maximum performance will be consistent with a quad-core Cortex-A15 chip like Nvidia's Tegra 4."

Also, if you might remember, I got similarly pissed at Intel at CES when they invented a non-TDP figure and then tried to say they were selling 7W chips. I think I'm pretty consistent when people are obfuscating through marketing. :-)

So in similar fashion, the MacBook Pros that Apple released since 2009 (?) with two GPUs, one discrete and one embedded (Intel) should be described by you as a Dual GPU notebook?

It's only one. And the Octa is only 4, for any purposes that your description should have. You are free to, on the footnote, add that it actually has 8 cores on die, but that only 4 work at any time.

/ot

Yes. Samsung was merely describing that the Exynos Octa has 8 physical CPU cores in it. This is a very truthful statement, and they might even release an Exynos Octa phone that uses all 8 cores simultaneously. The big.LITTLE specification encourages that as an option. Some of Apple's laptops are dual GPU. There are two physical GPUs in the device, and I know that, on the Windows side of things at least, both of them can be in use simultaneously to some extent.

EDIT: Hey guys, remember that time when Samsung claimed they had an Octa core processor... and it actually only had 8 cores in it?!?Yeah, that was hilarious back in the day.

I'll never understand why they don't just advertise it as what it is instead of coming up with deceptions. Having dedicated processors for things like voice recognition is badass as is, no real need to play it up when you can waste chip space on something that could be handled just fine by a 1.7ghz processor.